Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla (born 28 January 1955) is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist.

He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures.

Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies.

He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.

Khosla was born on 28 January 1955, to a Punjabi family in Pune, India.

Khosla's father was an officer in the Indian Army and was posted at New Delhi, India.

His father wanted him to also join the army.

He attended Mount St Mary's School for elementary school.

Khosla became interested in entrepreneurship after reading about the founding of Intel in Electronic Engineering Times as a teenager, and this inspired him to pursue technology as a career.

According to Khosla, he was inspired by Intel co-founder Andrew Grove, a Hungarian immigrant that got funding for Intel in Silicon Valley, when it was a startup.

From 1971 to 1976, Khosla attended IIT Delhi where he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering.

He started the first computer club in any IIT to do computer programming and operated the school's computer center while the operations staff were on strike.

He also wrote a paper on parallel processing as a teenager before the concept was adopted by the IT industry, and helped to start the first biomedical engineering program in India.

In 1975, Khosla attempted to start a soy milk company intended to provide a milk alternative to Indian consumers that do not have refrigerators to preserve cow milk.

Khosla received a master's in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University on a full scholarship.

He applied to Stanford University's MBA program but was rejected for lack of work experience.

He had two full-time jobs while finishing his master's for the two years of work experience, but was rejected a second time.

Three weeks into starting at Carnegie Mellon for his MBA, Khosla convinced the admissions staff to accept him into Stanford Graduate School of Business and received an MBA in 1980.

He is married to Neeru Khosla, his childhood girlfriend.

They have four children.

After completing his MBA at Stanford in 1980, Khosla decided to become an entrepreneur.

He rejected several employment opportunities to establish his first business venture.

Khosla developed a business plan for an electronic design automation company for electrical engineers.

He was introduced to employees at Intel and became the first full-time founder and Chief Financial Officer of Daisy Systems.

The company spent 80 percent of its resources on building custom computer hardware that could run its software.

As a result, Khosla left the company in order to create a startup that manufactures general purpose computers.

In 1981, Khosla co-founded Data Dump with a former Stanford classmate, which ended up failing.

In 1982, Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems (SUN is the acronym for the Stanford University Network), along with Stanford classmates Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, who was licensing a computer design to local companies.

UC Berkeley computer science graduate student Bill Joy later joined the company as co-founder.

Sun Microsystems sold servers to the universities they graduated from and other colleges, desktop computers, and created the Java programming language.

Khosla raised $300,000 in seed capital from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Within five years, Sun made $1 billion in annual sales.

Khosla also recruited early executives and developers such as Eric Schmidt and Carol Bartz.

He served as the first chairman and CEO from 1982 to 1984, when he left the company to become a venture capitalist.

In 1986, Khosla joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins as a general partner.

At Kleiner Perkins, Khosla managed investments in technologies, such as video games and semiconductors.

He helped create Nexgen, sold to AMD for 28 percent of its market cap, which was the first successful Intel microprocessor clone company.

In 2014, Forbes counted him among the 400 richest people in the United States.

In 2021, he was ranked 92nd on the Forbes 400 list.

As of March 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$6.8 billion.